Control structures and theories of interaction in speech understanding systems

Abstract

In this paper, we approach the problem of organisation and control in automatic speech understanding systems firstly, by presenting a theory of the non-serial interactions necessary between two processors in the system; namely, the morphosyntactic and the prosodic, and secondly, by showing how, when generalised, this theory allows one to specify a highly efficient architecture for a speech understanding system with a simple control structure and genuinely independent components. The theory of non-serial interactions we present predicts that speech is temporally organised in a very specific way; that is, the system would not function effectively if the temporal distribution of various types of information in speech were different. The architecture we propose is developed from a study of the task of speech understanding and, furthermore, is specific to this task. Consequently, the paper argues that general problem solving methods are unnecessary for speech understanding.